M turns 40!!!

As you all now know, M turned 40 this week! 

Thanks for all the emails and texts to wish him a happy day! We gave him his gifts then, but waited until Saturday to have the party. Just like last year, we had a double birthday party with a 6 year old friend of ours who shares a birthday with M. 

She is more into birthday parties than M is so he let her pick the theme this year. She wanted pirate, puppies, ponies, and princesses and anything else fun that started with the letter P, sooooooo…

There were stuffed puppies in paper party hats patiently waiting on all the kids’ dinner plates. We drank (M’s homemade rootbeer) out of fancy princessy glasses with our pinkies up. 

The puppies were a huge success!

The birthday cake was actually a frozen (remember it was sweltering this week) peanut butter pie. I had planned on having exquisitely decorated pony cookie pops surrounding the pie with big pearly pink gumballs at the top of each cookie pop stick, and miniature pendant flag garlands making the whole thing look like a carousel… Well the cookie pops were an epic fail. It might have helped if this weren’t THE very first time I’d ever made sugar cookies let alone tried to get them baked on a stick. I didn’t even get a chance to fail on my very first stab at making royal icing because I burned the heck out of the sugar cookie horses that turned into melted blobs anyway. 

I carried on with the plan, minus the ponies, and it was still a cute pie, just didn’t have any letter P connection beyond the pendants and pink gumballs.

We ended the night with a pirate treasure hunt with goofy clues written in pirate-speak, leading to more silly clues. Everyone’s favorite clue was. . . 

       “Avast! It's a clue what ye want, a clue ye’d expect, so Jolly Roger J’ll take ye to the steps that lead to the deck. (No not the poop deck you silly!)” 

They giggled about the poop deck for the rest of the night. Did you realize that there are several pirate name generators on-line?! Of course you did. If you didn’t, you might want to check some of them out in preparation for International Talk Like A Pirate Day, a mere 10 days from now. Savy! The favorite pirate names found in our clues were “Squid Lips Alex” and “Bishop Redbeard – ol’ fish breath ‘imself”.

Oh and did you notice the balloons?  The kids got out the pump and started blowing up balloon after balloon and I apparently started channeling Chihuly and before anyone knew what was happening KAPOWIE!  We had this above our kitchen table!  I felt very complemented when S told me that she likes when I get decorating for stuff because you never would have imagined how it will turn out.

I especially liked how it looked from outside after dark!

Today the WHOOOOOOLE Primary (Sunday school for kids ages 3 to 12) tip-toed through the church with a GIGANTIC happy birthday card, a candy lei, and a gold crown that said “I am a Child of God” on it, to M’s office door where he usually teaches the teenage boys' class during that time, and we started serenading him with a happy birthday song. So it was super anti-climatic when instead the second councilor opened the door and said that the Bishop had taken the young men to a member’s house who couldn’t make it to church today. We sang anyway, sent a video of it to his phone, and I brought home all the loot for him.

 So glad to have this great guy.  We are hoping that he has at least 60 fabulous years ahead of him.